Read one digest instead of ninety emails

There is a version of inbox triage that helps and a version that just moves the problem. Labels move the problem: the mail is sorted and you still have to open the inbox to find out what happened.

A digest is different. It is one thing to read, and it answers the only question you actually have at 8am, which is whether anything needs you before your first meeting.

Write down what you would want to know at 8am

Not "summarise my email". Nobody wants that.

You want to know: did anything break, did a customer get upset, did anyone agree to something, and is there a decision waiting on me. Write your own version of that list. It is the whole prompt.

Build the job

Every weekday at 7am, read the mail that arrived since 6pm yesterday.

Write a digest in exactly these sections, and leave a section out entirely
if it is empty rather than writing "none":

  NEEDS YOU        decisions or approvals waiting on me specifically
  SOMETHING BROKE  outages, complaints, anything with an angry tone
  MONEY            invoices, quotes, anything about payment
  FYI              two lines maximum, only if genuinely worth knowing

One line per item: who it is from, what they want, and how old it is.
Link the thread.

Do not summarise newsletters, receipts, calendar notifications or anything
automated. If the whole night was quiet, say "Nothing needed you" and stop.

"Leave a section out rather than writing none" earns its place. A digest with four headings and three empty ones trains you to skim, and once you skim it you have lost the one thing a digest is for. The shape should change with the night.

Read it for a week before you change anything

The first few will be wrong in a specific way: it will over-report. Everything looks important to something that has not learned your business yet.

Resist rewriting the prompt on day one. After five days you will be able to say precisely what kept appearing that you did not care about, and that sentence is a better edit than five guesses.

Send it where you already are

A digest in an app you have to remember to open is a digest you will stop reading by week three. Turn on notify-on-completion and put it in Slack, or let the employee mail it to you so it arrives with everything else.

What good looks like

You read one thing, it takes ninety seconds, and you know whether you can go to your first meeting without opening your inbox.

The honest test is week four. If you are still reading it then, it is working. If you started skipping it, it is reporting too much, and the fix is to cut a section rather than to try harder.